The invention relates generally to communications devices that include alert mechanisms and more particularly to methods and devices for enabling a person to make an informed decision as to whether to respond to a call.
Presently available wireless communications devices include radio pagers, telephony-enabled wireless laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cellular telephones. Each of these devices includes at least one alert mechanism to provide notification of an incoming communication. The alert mechanism may be a ringer similar to those found in home telephones, but other audible alerts are employed. For example, the detection of an incoming communication may trigger a melody or a periodic beep. As an alternative to an audible alert, a sound-free method of providing notification may be used. The most common silent approach is to provide a vibration-based notification. Such tactile alerts are often used in pagers. A pager may have a means of switching between providing an audible alert and a tactile alert.
When an incoming communication causes activation of an alert mechanism, the user is typically required to manipulate the wireless device in order to initiate a connection or to obtain the information for returning a call. For a pager, the communication may be the reception of a telephone number of a person requesting a callback. The callback number is visually presented on a pager display, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD).
Responding to an incoming communication may be impractical, and sometimes risky. A person operating a motorcycle may not be in a position to safely check the display of a pager. At other times, it may merely be inconvenient to respond to the activation of a pager or other wireless communications device, such as when a person has soiled hands from yard work or auto repair. At other times, the immediate response to a pager alert may be socially or professionally awkward, such as when a sound-free pager alert mechanism is triggered during a one-to-one meeting with a supervisor.
For occasions in which the response to notification of an incoming communication is risky, inconvenient or awkward, the owner of the pager or other communications device is placed in a position in which he or she must make a decision as to the appropriate action. The concern with not responding to the alert is that the communication may relate to an emergency situation. Without checking the display of a pager, the paged person is not in a position to determine the importance of a call. The difficulty is partially remedied by the apparatus described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,394,140 to Wong et al. The apparatus is used in a communication receiver to control an alert in response to receiving a callback number. When the callback number is received at a pager, a processor compares the number to numbers in a list of pre-programmed callback numbers. If the received callback number matches one of the pre-programmed numbers in the list, the processor selects a particular audible alert. The selected audible alert is used by an audible alert generation element to audibilize a notification having a particular cadence and/or a particular frequency. Consequently, the cadence and frequency can be used to identify a specific callback number.
The prior art apparatus to Wong et al. provides some information as a basis for the determination of whether to immediately respond to an audible notification of an incoming communication. However, merely knowing the identity of a caller or person requesting a callback is not sufficient information for determining whether the need for an immediate response justifies the risk, impracticality, or social or professional awkwardness associated with the immediate response.
What is needed is a method and device for enabling a user of a communications device to make informed decisions regarding whether to respond to call notifications.
A method of generating alerts relating to incoming communications includes enabling a communications device, such as a pager, to include both an urgency mode and a normal mode (i.e., a non-urgency mode). Operation in the urgency mode is triggered by a determination that a particular incoming communication has an urgency. The patterns of the alerts for providing notification of urgent communications are distinguishable from the patterns of alerts for providing notification of non-urgent communications. In the preferred embodiment, the alerts are tactile based, such as vibration-based notifications. In the most preferred embodiment, the communications device allows a user to assign particular vibrational patterns to specific sources of incoming communications. For example, a pager may be configured by a user to uniquely associate a particular callback number with first and second alerts, with the first alert being used when the urgency mode is triggered and the second alert being used when the pager is in the normal mode.
Human input may be used to identify calls as having an urgency with respect to notification. In one embodiment, the human input is from the user of the communications device. In this xe2x80x9csmart devicexe2x80x9d embodiment, the user is able to configure the device to associate a particular call source to a particular pattern. For example, the supervisor of the user may be associated with a pattern of long-off-long-off-long-off. The urgency mode may be designed to convert the three xe2x80x9clongsxe2x80x9d to xe2x80x9cshorts,xe2x80x9d so that the vibrational pattern of a pager is short-off-short-off-short-off when an incoming call is identified as being from the supervisor. The xe2x80x9csmartxe2x80x9d pager is configured to enable the user to assign and unassign the incoming communications from the supervisor as being urgent.
A xe2x80x9cdumbxe2x80x9d device may also be utilized in practicing the invention. In this embodiment, the unique associations of alert patterns to sources of calls may be configured at the location of the service provider. For example, in a paging system a server may be allowed to store pattern instructions. The pager owner configures which callers have which patterns, such as vibrational cadences. A short-off-short-off cadence may be designated as pattern 1. When the service provider determines that an incoming communication is from the source associated with pattern 1, the provider transmits an instruction to use pattern 1. The receiving communication device then generates the designated pattern. If the pager owner wishes to change the assignments of cadences to particular sources, this can be done by means of a voice menu at the service provider.
As another alternative, the assignments may be made at a web-based system. That is, the web-based system may be used by the device owner to designate the cadences assigned to particular telephone numbers. The web-based system may also be used to designate which calls are to be assigned an urgent status. Thus, all calls from a supervisor may be assigned an urgent status.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) may be used to determine the perceived urgency of an incoming communication, such as a call or a page. If a communications device has sufficient computational sophistication (such as a laptop computer), the IVR techniques may be implemented at the device level. However, the IVR approach will typically need to be exercised at the service provider level. A verbal menu can be presented by an IVR unit of a wireless service provider. For example, a caller may be presented with an option of xe2x80x9cPress or say 1 for an urgent page, or 2 for a non-urgent page.xe2x80x9d Conventional voice recognition or dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) recognition may be used to determine the input from the calling party. Based upon the determination, a message is sent to the communications device, with the message including an indication as to whether the urgency mode should be triggered.
In the preferred embodiment, the communications device includes a tactile-based alerting mechanism having an urgency mode and a non-urgency mode. The alerting mechanism is configured to generate distinguishable tactile alert patterns (e.g., vibrational cadences) based upon whether the alerting mechanism is in the urgency mode or the non-urgency mode. The device also includes a controller connected to selectively activate the alerting mechanism in response to incoming communications, such as calls or pages. The controller is enabled to access identifications of perceived urgency and is configured to switch the alerting mechanism to the urgency mode upon accessing an indication of perceived urgency for a particular incoming communication. The identification of perceived urgency may be generated internally if the communications device is a xe2x80x9csmartxe2x80x9d device. In another embodiment, the identifications of perceived urgency are received from a service provider, such as a pager system. In the most preferred embodiment, the communications device is a pager in which the selection of a particular vibrational pattern is based upon both perceived urgency and the recognition of a callback number. That is, each pre-programmed callback number is associated with a first alert pattern that is used when the alerting mechanism is in the urgency mode and is associated with a second alert pattern that is used when the alerting mechanism is in the non-urgency mode.